Welcome to this issue of The Pause, my friend.
Recently, I've been reading the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, which argues our attention is the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. In this book, Odell argues we have to actively and continuously choose how we use our attention, especially in a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell the attention we have. I tend to agree with her, and I’m betting, to some degree, you do as well.
Odell suggests many ways in which we as a collective society can resist the attention economy, but the one that I've been turning over in my mind, and the one that I'd love for us to explore, is the idea of destruction, removal, and remediation (aka dismantling) as progress.
So without further ado, let’s get to pausing in 3…2…1…
📈 Progress
How to Do Nothing has two passages that have stuck with me that I’d love to share with you. The first is this (for context, Odell was talking about a dam that took years to build, but ended up being dismantled decades later to the benefit of the people and environment surrounding it):
Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation...but I am interested in dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation, something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly. It provides a new direction for our work ethic...Seen through the lens of dismantling, tearing down the dam is indeed a creative act, one that does put something new in the world, even if it's putting it back.
And the second is this (for context, Odell is talking about Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer who invented "do-nothing farming," in which his philosophy was to interfere with the land he was farming as little as possible, essentially letting the land do its thing instead of trying to force it to do what he wanted):
In his book, Fukuoka writes that "[b]ecause the world is moving with such furious energy in the opposite direction, it may appear that I have fallen behind at times." Indeed, just as we associate innovation with the production of something new, we also associate an inventor with creating some new kind of design. But Fukuoka's "design" was more or less to remove the design altogether. This leads to the uncanny quality of dismantling. As he writes: "That which was viewed as primitive and backward is now unexpectedly seen to be far ahead of modern science. This may seem strange at first, but I do not find it strange at all."
It got me thinking about the Facebook-esque attitude our culture has adopted in the past decade-plus of move fast and break things. An attitude that, by the conventional definition of progress, has created many technological advancements. An iPhone? Mind-blowing. A way to connect and share mass updates with loved ones in the click of a few buttons? Also, mind-blowing.
But, this conventional progress (the moving fast), has also come with the breaking of things -- things that include stuff like our desire to find common ground, invest in local communities, be bored, and do nothing, to name a few.
And so, I thought for today, we might consider what we'd stand to gain if we adapted our definition of progress.
What if the progress we need these days is less about moving fast and breaking things and more about moving intentionally and reinvesting in things that already existed in the past? What if progress does include destroying, removing, and remediating those parts of our attitudes, ideologies, and technologies that seemed constructive at first, but have actually turned out to be destructive?
What if dismantling what we've built is the exact progress we need?
I don't actually have answers to these questions yet, and I'm guessing you likely don't either, but I thought it would be cool for us to consider what the world might look like if we were to adapt our definition of progress to include the destroying, removing, and remediating of harmful things we've built in the name of progress.
⏸ Pause & Reconnect
Remember, there are no right or wrong answers — just what’s true for you.
What does progress mean to you?
How could adapting your definition of progress to include the destruction, removal, and remediation of harmful things built in the name of progress benefit you? Your community?
Is there anything in your own life you'd like to destroy, remove, or remediate as a form of progress? A set of ideals? A way of being? Something you’ve invested time in that you’re ready to give up?